Tonight marked the opening of the 2014 New York Film Festival with the world premiere of David Fincher's Gone Girl -- here's Jason's take on the film.
In the deeply darkly funny world of Gillian Flynn's bestselling murder mystery Gone Girl, Nick and Amy Dunne's wedding vows are like cliffhangers or dares - in sickness and in health, for richer, for poorer, I do... she does, he does... what exactly? All manner of unspeakables, it turns out. The book's at its sharpest as a ghoulish fun-house mirror reflection of deranged marital compromise - the hollowing out of our interior spaces for the exterior presentation of platonic ideals; a jack-o-lantern propped on the front porch with a pumpkin pie in the oven, all is pretty and home and sugar and spice on the windowsill... save that horror show, smashed glass coffee tables, mopped blood, behind closed doors. And what happens when the nightmare tumbles out into the street for all the world, and all the world's cameras, to see? Who pulls the mess back in once its spilled, and how...
David Fincher's Gone Girl is at its best when it has everybody grabbing their pails and their shovels and frantically trying to scoop up those spilled Humpty Dumpty pumpkin guts and make sense of it. For a two and a half hour movie it's shockingly spry on its feet, bouncing from Clue One to Clue Two in its own emotional kind of scavenger hunt, trying to piece together the What Went Wrong And How, and in its finest moments it vibes on a surprisingly loose Coen-esque sense of danger - as the sharp tools in the shed try to stay one step forward and find themselves in up to their necks, there's fun to be had in their catch-up, watching games change and rules rewritten mid-play.
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That looseness is a surprise since this is David "notorious task-master" Fincher at the helm, king of a thousand takes - Gone Girl as a story is a puzzle that extends towards infinity, piece after piece snapping together and outward for a lifetime, but Fincher still somehow manages to make it feel as if he's shaken the box up a bit. The mysteries scuttle sideways at times, out of the light, refusing his own inclination towards schematics even as the story strains for them. Maybe it has something to do with the foregrounded sense of humor (it's a parade of unexpected punchlines at times), or Ben Affleck's amiable, muffled presence (more on that in a second), but this is not a list of seven sins or two timelines meeting perfectly at the center - this movie has a middle-aged amusement by the unknowable rattling its seemingly cold bones.
Honestly I might have had some more of that younger, colder Fincher though - the sense of humor sometimes feels off-key; tonally sloppy. Third act developments (we are attempting to steer clear of spoiler-territory) leave some of the actors blowing in the breeze - not to hold the movie's feet to the book's fire but a lot of what makes Amy into "Amazing Amy," what makes her particularly spectacular on the page, is the deeply darkly funny specificity of her voice, unpeeling like an onion, and that falls away from the movie just when I needed it most. There's a passage toward the middle that highlights her, shall we say, observational humor - it's the best passage in the book too - but there needed to be more. Rosamund Pike is pretty darned wonderful in the role all the same but without that scathing torrent of Amy's words the character veers towards becoming something else, something that skews the viewpoint just off center enough to muddy the point-of-view - a crucial balancing act tipping off a bit.
Not helping with the muddying or the balance is Ben Affleck, who's never been much more than a one-note actor to me. He's used well for awhile, a confuse-faced prop over-matched by the seas raging around him, several steps behind - it works when that's what we need. But the story, double and triple-faced as it is, doesn't always need that one single face, and Affleck never gave me a foot-hold, a spot to turn and care just when caring is maybe what's needed. Things happen to Ben Affleck; Ben Affleck doesn't make things happen.
There sure is a terrific supporting cast around him though, dancing and doing their mighty damndest. Carrie Coon as Nick's twin sister, a consistently in-shock but nevertheless solid emotional bellwether from the storm, and Kim Dickens as the detective snapping together all the disparate parts, are stand-outs, but the casting magic trickles down into all the corners - Neil Patrick Harris reels in a character I was afraid he'd spin out, while Missi Pyle and Sela Ward as two waxen masks of media stewardship (comedy and tragedy) spike their little scenes like gangbusters. The movie manages to hang on, but just.
Gone Girl screened 8 times Friday night to open the festival. It opens in theaters nationwide on Friday October 3rd.